


Magnanimous Broccoli's Eldritch Horror Practice

by Chicwowwow



Category: Arthurian Mythology, Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Irish Mythology
Genre: Eldritch, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Gen, Horror, Loss of Identity, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:14:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27682733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chicwowwow/pseuds/Chicwowwow
Summary: I haven't written anything in a good long while. I enjoy writing Eldritch Horror. 2+2=4, I'm going to practice writing eldritch horror.I don't know if I'll continue this basic one-shot yet, depends on how it's received. Please give me your constructive criticism so that I can grow and improve as a writer. Thank you!
Kudos: 1





	Magnanimous Broccoli's Eldritch Horror Practice

It was time.

The circle was designed, checked, checked again, drawn, redone in a hurry, triple checked, and made permanent. Simon's chant was readied, each syllable and every flowing phrase practiced so often he know it better than his own name. The material components had been gathered and washed in a mix of chicken's blood and a standard alchemical wash of soapstone dust, salt, and the first milk of a dairy cow. The materials representing his future were then placed at each cardinal direction, with a further seven, more meaningful objects representing his past placed inside the outer circle. Things like Simon's first lock of hair, a favourite childhood toy, his first tooth, and et cetera.

With a slow, shaky breathe, Simon took a moment to centre himself. He had no room for error. Even the most harmless in the Great River were incalculably dangerous is approached wrong, if approached without an inner calm. Most of his fellow apprentices had made contracts with their spirits, and spoke of their trip to the Great River with awe colouring their voice. Many contracted an ancestor, or a mindless animal spirit, but not Simon. He was nothing if not ambitious, and what could be a greater demonstration of his ambitions than contracting to an atypical spirit.

It was true, the spirit that you connected with when you cast a portion of your soul into the Great River, like a lure, was random. You could not predetermine the result. But the higher the quality of your materials, the greater your preparations and the more effort placed into your chant, the better your chances of a strong spirit. Well, Simon had gone all out.

With a final deep breathe, Simon began to chant.

Vision slowly faded from his mind, like mud being washed away in trails by a gentle, steady rain, though he new his chant continued strong. He had trained countless hours for this! He would prevail!

Strange colours and shapes swirled, their mystery not in their form but rather in how they twisted and bent into one another. Their amorphous dance shifting through, between and around his mind as though they were the solid and he, the ephemeral. As though they were the ones with a grounding in reality. They were not. Simon had made a grave error. He had invaded the hunting grounds of something far older, far more unscrupulous than the average apprentice would.

In a moment of contrasting clarity and confusion, reality sharpened and focused on a shape slowly reaching toward his face. A hand. A claw and a paw, a beak and a tendril and everything all at once and never at all. It lifted and stroked his cheek with the caring touch of a mother and the cruel, grinding grasp of a tyrant.

After an eternal moment, it retreated, and he found himself looking into two black void eyes, all the more present and real in their absence.

A moment of crushing silence, the tension collapsing upon the flesh like a wave. The will giving way like the crippled wheeze of a beggar's breath.

"A deal? You shouldn't have."

The shaking of hands between two business partners. The clutching, desperate hold of two dying lovers. A choking, wretched promise in a quiet field of cold blood and dead bone.

A bargain.

"Yes." It came out as a desperate scream and a forlorn whimper, but the word never changed.

The two void eyes peered out at a point past his flesh but just before his soul.

A sacrifice was required.

"We are bounteous and generous in Truth, but a little more could not hurt."

Simon's name was heard, though he could not tell who had said it first, and the man, the boy, the child took up the chant.

His name flew from the mouth like tongues of flame, burning up upon exit, leaving a sign of their passing but no evidence of their previous existence.

A name was chanted with the fervour of the flock and the promise of the sheepdog. The sound warping under his frail flesh-tongue, the soul trying to grasp it tight, to no avail.

The flesh thing continued to mimic the sound like a child following a kindly parent's lead, all meaning lost with the slow, sputtering death of the synapses.

…

Silence spread through the void as the chorus came to a close. The deed was done, the act committed. There would be no returning from this. The price had been paid and now the gift had to be accepted.

"An acceptable trade, contractor/child/friend/us, may it be a mutually satisfactory forever."


End file.
